The Sponsor System Resurgent

This chapter discusses the modernization of the sponsor system. It first considers how advertising sustained and deepened its role as a primary source of finance for digital services, even as it continued its voracious and uneven globalization. It then examines how advertisers accelerated their drive to revamp communications commodity chains, along with issues that arose from Google's entanglement in a larger set of commercial relationships and its impact on the political economy of the commodity chain within which search is embedded. The chapter also looks at the politics of privacy, with particular emphasis on the case of Edward Snowden, the internet as an engine of surveillance, and the debate over personal information that pitted big advertisers, network operators, internet intermediaries, and media conglomerates against popular will.